Sunday, July 31, 2005 2:46 pm

The Panthers’ first-round draft pick, cornerback Chris Gamble, signed a contract last night and got to camp in time for this afternoon’s practice. Outstanding. Given the team’s questions regarding its secondary, it’s good that we don’t have any holdouts.

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Voting-rights groups sued Florida election administrators on Wednesday to overturn a rule that prohibits manual recounting of ballots cast with touch-screen machines, a lawsuit with echoes of the state’s disputed 2000 presidential election voting.The lawsuit said the rule was “illogical” and rested on the questionable assumption that electronic voting machines perform flawlessly 100 percent of the time. It also said the rule violated a Florida law that expressly requires manual recounts of certain ballots if the margin in an election is less than 0.25 percent of the votes cast.

Court disputes over how to conduct manual recounts of punch card and absentee ballots delayed Florida’s results in the 2000 presidential election, which George W. Bush won after taking the state by 537 votes.

The lawsuit was filed against the Florida Department of State, which oversees elections and which issued the rule in April.

Plaintiffs included the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, the nonpartisan political group Common Cause and other voter education and civil rights groups. The suit will be heard by the Division of Administrative Hearings in Tallahassee, the state capital.

The plaintiffs said in their suit the electronic voting machines were “known to malfunction and to be subject to malicious tampering.”

I might’ve made it “vulnerable to malicious tampering” because I don’t think we can prove such machines ever have been tampered with. But otherwise, good for the plaintiffs.